trial VS c-mera

Little Spark - made with Trial

The engine is called Trial. https://github.com/shirakumo/trial.

I don't know what the situation is like for 3D game programming in CL. Shinmera recently kickstarted a game but it's 2D I think and I don't know if his engine (https://github.com/Shirakumo/trial) does 3D. But regardless of what you're using, going into learning how to program while also trying to learn how to use the game engines available in the CL world will probably be a recipe for getting overwhelmed and discouraged. I'd recommend going through the Steve Losh post first and reading A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation and/or Practical Common Lisp to get some solid general familiarity with using CL. Both are available online for free. You can also browse through the Cookbook: https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/

For graphics there's a lot of different variants and options. I use Trial, but that doesn't have any docs yet, I'm afraid.

Kandria and Eternia both are built on top of the game engine Trial, which I and a few others at Shirakumo have been working on for some years now. Trial itself makes use of a bunch of lower level libraries like cl-opengl, GLFW, pngload, harmony, etc. but a huge amount of the codebase was written by me. If you're interested in its development, I recommend hopping by the #shirakumo channel on the Freenode IRC network. I'd be happy to answer questions there!

A good way to do it is to keep a staging area of sorts that keeps track of the manually allocated objects and their state. When you allocate you batch all objects to allocate together and then execute the load in one go, updating the records in the staging area. Then, when you're ready to switch to a different scene or whatever, you diff the staging area against the current set of objects that need to be live and deallocate everything else in one go.

Arguably Pacman Clone - it uses WISP (non s-exps syntax for any lisp) + C-Mera which is some kind of mix of C and CL, and is written mostly in CL.

c-mera does exist.

Thanks, you're right. I chose JS because it is so well-known, but I think it does have some other advantages as well. For example, if you need to run a lot of compatibility test commands, or need to generate code via external programs, or even make network requests to get config values or something, you can do all of that in parallel with JS async instead of sequentially like configure. You might find https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera interesting. It's similar to this project but uses Lisp and a unified syntax.

I used https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera for this purpose and it worked very well.

That's a Lisp preprocessor for a non-Lisp language.

If you program in C using the Common Lisp c-mera preprocessor, or any of the other similar systems, it's the same thing.

You're writing everything in S-exps, and the expansions use conses, but the output is C; so that of course cannot call cons at run time.

https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera

even more interesting are the handful of projects layering lisp style macros on top of C. i've seen several go by over the years; a quick google search brought up c-mera and cmacro.

If you look for lisp-like syntax in C: - cmera https://github.com/kiselgra/c-mera